Killer

by Jessica Gadziala

  "Took Cash a year to get in. But I fell for him in a moment."

  "Knew Wolf for a year too. Took me just a second to fall though."

  My eyes drifted to Alex, figuring they were all going to spill their stories. "Oh, Breaker kidnapped me," she said with a shrug. "We got together kinda fast. I knew by the end of the first week I loved him, but I didn't tell him for like... half a year."

  "She's stubborn," Lo said with an eye roll.

  "Summer fell for Reign in like two weeks," Janie supplied, waving a hand. "But what we're saying is... love doesn't always creep up on you slow and steady as you share stupid shit about your childhood or why you hate avocados or whatever. Love is just that second when you feel it click, you know?" I did know. I knew that moment. And the scary thing? It was the second Johnnie walked into my apartment and told me he got me. But that was just... crazy. That wasn't love. That was... well hell. I didn't know what that was. But it couldn't have been love. I didn't know him at all. "I don't know if you believe in soulmates or if they exist or any of that cheesy bullshit," Janie said with an eye roll, "but it's like that. A part of you just... gets that other person."

  Well then.

  "Just saying... don't dismiss what you're feeling because someone told you it's too soon," Alex said.

  "Even if that someone is you," Summer said with a knowing smile.

  "I don't understand why you guys are here..." I said, needing to change the topic before they gave me any more hope. I couldn't take that.

  They exchanged looks and Janie shrugged. "I think you kinda get that we are all kinda stuck inside this huge boy's club between the guys here at Hailstorm and all the bikers at The Henchmen compound and all that... we girls need to stick together."

  I felt a smile tug at my lips despite myself. "So you're like... trying to recruit me into your... girl's club?"

  "We're just showing you that you'll be in good company when you get your head out of your ass and get Shooter back," Janie said with a smile. She was... blunt to say the least. I kind of liked that. You knew exactly where she stood. "I know I can speak for myself and say I'm a badass bitch to have as a friend. And Lo is like... queen of the badasses. Alex is like an anti-social badass and Summer, well... you can't trust her with an automatic weapon, but she bore the offspring of a biker leader so that goes without saying that she's a badass too."

  I shook my head, smiling a little sadly. "That's nice but... I don't see how I'd fit in. I'm not really a... badass or anything like that."

  "Honey, you got Shooter by the balls," Lo said with a smirk. "If that isn't badass, I don't know what is."

  "Yeah but I'm not like... a hacker or a like... a leader or..."

  "Amy," Summer said with a head shake, "right now I am just a glorified milk machine," she said, gesturing toward her chest. "But I'm still badass. Just... don't second-guess your position in Shooter's life because you think you don't fit in with us. The fact that one of our guys fell for you is proof enough that you're awesome. Because they're friggen great guys and they don't fall for just anyone."

  I let out a long breath, pulling my legs up and sitting cross-legged. "You guys are forgetting one thing. Even if I did decide, and that's a big if, that I wanted to be with Johnnie, he dumped me."

  "Oh, pshh," Lo said, waving a hand. "That's the easy part."

  "In what universe is that the easy part?"

  "In the girl universe," Janie said, shaking her head like I was being silly. "You realize guys like tits and ass and pussy, right? And you realize that you know... you have those things."

  "You think I can just... seduce him into wanting me again?"

  "Well, yes and no," Summer said.

  "Okay," Alex cut in, sounding like she was ready to lay it out without all the runaround. "Shoot has a job in two days. He'll be gone for four or five days . We're saying you go and settle in, make yourself at home. Move some of your stuff in. Show him that you are not going anywhere, that you belong in his life."

  "Move my stuff in?" I asked, feeling my head start to spin.

  "It's already on its way," Lo said, drawing my attention. At my look of shock, she smiled. "Well, Shoot had me send guys down there to investigate. I made a call a few hours ago and they packed up your shit and are driving back with it. Hang up your pictures. Put your clothes in his closet. Stock his pitifully bare cabinets. Get cozy. He'll see it and he'll see how much he wants that, wants you there, wants you in his life."

  "You guys can't be serious," I said, shaking my head at them. The plan was just so... over the top. It was ridiculous. But still... was it worth a shot? My stuff was apparently on the way anyway.

  "Oh, we're serious. And we will all be there, watching our men get nice and sweaty hauling your shit up to his apartment. Oh yeah," Janie said, closing her eyes at the image.

  "The guys know about this?" I asked, not able to hide my surprise.

  "How'd you think we got the idea?" Alex asked, smiling for the first time.

  "Seriously?"

  "Yeah well... they all kinda fell for us when we were forced to live with them because of, well, the crazy shit we had going on around us," Janie explained. "So I guess they think that has something to do with it. Breaker coughed up the info about his job. He will also let us into his place. It's all set up. So the day after tomorrow, you move in. Then the second you get him back, you need to call us. I don't care if you have to call us mid-fuck, we need to hear from you," Janie demanded.

  "Um..." I wasn't going to agree to it. The plan was stupid. It was worse than stupid. It actually made no kind of rational sense. But still...

  "Look, what's left for you in Alabama anyway?" Lo asked in a way that suggested she knew there was nothing for me there except work. "Up here, honey, you have us at least. I mean I know you don't really know us. But you will and you'll like us. We're good people. Even if, by some twist of fate that makes no damn sense at all, you and Shoot don't work out... we'll still be here for you. Isn't that better than what you had down in bumfuck nowhere?"

  Well, when she put it that way...

  "Plus, we have way more druggies and boozers for you to reform here," Janie added.

  I felt a smile pull at my lips, lifting up the dark mood that had pulled at me for a day. Hell, it lifted the dark mood that had plagued me since I was seven years old. They were right. I had nothing left. I had to move. I had to move on. And, well, they were right; I didn't know them. But they sat at my sick bed and hatched a ridiculous plan to try to get me what they knew I wanted. I already liked them. Job opportunities would definitely be more abundant in a busier area like Navesink Bank. So yeah, even if things with Johnnie fizzled and burned out, as much as that hurt to even think about, there would be something left for me here. There was nothing left for me anywhere else.

  Was it really even a choice?

  "Okay," I said, giving them a tentative smile.

  I got four smiles from them, open and welcoming.

  And I knew right then, for the first time since I was a kid, I knew that I had found a home.

  Twenty-one

  Shooter

  Six days.

  Fucking hell.

  Work was supposed to help. But, then again, my work didn't exactly take too much concentration. Sitting around looking through a scope waiting for the target to get in range, yeah, it left a man a lot of time to think. The last thing I needed was time to think. But I had about four full days of it, sitting on top of that damn building in the scorching heat. So I thought. About her. Like I had any kind of fuckin' choice of thinking about anything else.

  All I could see was her sitting off the side of that hospital bed, her face slashed open, her throat bruised, her eyes full of tears, blood all over her clothes, half of which being hers, half belonging to the son of a bitch I had killed just inches from her. I left her like that: raw, needy. I didn't hold her hand through the stitches. I didn't go to the food court and buy her ice cream for her throat that ha
d to be sore.

  I just fucking left.

  I wanted to believe it was better that way. I wanted to think it was smart to make her think I was a careless asshole who could do all those things without a second thought. But there were second thoughts, and third, and five-thousandth. I could have stayed with her. I could have taken her back to my apartment to let her recoup. I could have held her through the nightmares I knew she would have, visions of a bullet exploding through Luis' skull flashing through her mind in unguarded moments. I could have helped her through. Then I could have gently nudged her back into her old life. I could have driven her back to Alabama myself.

  I could have been a good fucking guy.

  Instead, I crushed her.

  I left her when she needed me the most.

  That was how she was going to remember me.

  And maybe that was better for her, for closure purposes, but it was doing nothing but chafing at me.

  Then again, I deserved the discomfort. It was selfish of me to get involved with her in the first place. I knew the second I laid eyes on her that she was too good for me. But did I stay away and let her live her life? No. I pushed my way into her life and I forced her to let me in. I made her walls topple. I took her first time. And then I left her in a god damn hospital room in an unfamiliar town with no friends. It didn't take a genius to know that those walls I knocked down, she was sitting around and carefully reconstructing and reinforcing. No one else would get back in. She would never let herself feel that way again.

  "Fuck," I growled, slamming my door to my car as I looked up at my apartment building.

  Six days.

  I wondered how many more days like that I had ahead of me.

  If there was any kind of justice in the world, I would never stop having them.

  If I hadn't been so focused on my sour mood, I might have seen the horseshoe hung above my door; a horseshoe that did not belong to me. But I didn't see it. I was too focused on just getting home and going through the motions.

  Though when I opened the door and was greeted by a, "Hey Johnnie. Welcome home," by a disarmingly upbeat Amelia walking back from the kitchen with a steaming cup of tea in her hands, well, I started noticing things.

  First, I noticed her. She was in a pair of white shorts and a slightly roomy deep purple tee. Her feet were bare and her hands were wrapped around a mug that didn't belong to me. It was practically the size of a soup bowl with a floral pattern. Definitely not mine. Her arms weren't wrapped and the cuts from a week ago were healed to little pink marks. Her stitches were out and the cut on her face was still red and angry, but healing. The bruises on her throat were gone. Her long dark hair was pulled up and piled in a messy bun at the top of her head. She walked casually over to my sectional, tucking her legs half under her body, angled to the side, watching the program she left up on the TV like she was completely at home.

  At that thought, my eyes drifted away, noticing things. Like the knitted blanket over the back of my couch, the snow globe collection piled on the cabinet below my TV. A pair of her shoes were beside the front door next to a coat rack that definitely wasn't mine and a hanging rack for keys. In the kitchen, there was a teapot on my stove and a collection of glass canisters on the counter with little black labels: sugar, flour, tea.

  Confused and not quite ready to say anything, I walked myself toward my bedroom, stopping dead in my doorway, seeing an assortment of throw pillows on the bed and a collection of perfume bottles on top of one of my dressers. I walked to the closet, pulling open the door and finding all my clothes pushed to one side (okay, half of one side) and all of Amelia's clothes hung neatly in their place; her shoes lined up on the floor beside mine. I turned, looking toward the bathroom where a light pink robe was hanging on the back of the door and an assortment of makeup and lotion and face wash was piled on the vanity.

  I felt the smile pull at my lips despite my confusion. What the hell was going on?

  I turned back and leaned into opening to the living room to see Amelia's face on me. She was trying for casual, but there was a tightness next to her eyes as she watched me.

  "Angel, what the fuck?" I asked and it came out almost as a laugh.

  "Funny thing," she said, cradling her soup tea cup. "I was sitting in the hospital waiting for my pain medicine to kick in and I got a visit."

  She stopped there, waiting for me to ask, so I did. "A visit?"

  "Yes. From this badass blond woman named Lo," she paused and I felt my grin stretch at her using the word 'badass'. "And, well, she kind of adopted me."

  "Adopted you?" I asked, thinking that sounded exactly like Lo. She loved her fucking strays.

  "And then I woke up to a bed surrounded by women and I found out that not only did Lo adopt me, but so did Janie, Alex, and Summer."

  "They put you up to this?" I asked, knowing I should be pissed, but feeling like I owed every last one of them the biggest bouquet of flowers a florist could put together.

  "Well, yes and no."

  "How no?" I asked, moving out of the doorway to sit my ass down on the coffee table right in front of her, feeling for the first time in six days the swirling hollowness in my chest start to subside.

  "It was their idea that I stay in Jersey since there are so many more alcoholics and drug addicts here for me to try to fix," she said with a slight eye roll that suggested those were one of the girl's words, not hers. It didn't take much thought to decide it was Janie's words. "But this," she said, sweeping a hand out toward her apartment. "Had nothing to do with any of us."

  "Who did it have to do with, then?"

  "Oh, this was all Breaker, Cash, Reign, and Wolf."

  "You're shitting me," I said, shaking my head.

  "Well, no. See... they all realized that they fell in love with Alex, Lo, Summer, and Janie when they were forced to live with one another during their crises so they thought that maybe if I moved in here..."

  "That I would fall in love with you if you moved in and staked your claim?" I asked and she looked suddenly horrified, her eyes wide, her mouth open in a small O. "Baby, they were a little late."

  "A little late?" she repeated, brows drawing together, making those two lines etch between them.

  I reached out, taking the mug from her hands and setting it on the floor to the side, then grabbed her hips and dragged her forward until her feet hit the floor, then kept pulling until she was on top of me, straddling my hips. My hand moved upward, cradling the side of her face. "Sweetheart, think I loved you the minute you asked me with tears in your eyes if my Pops really knocked my baby teeth in. And I'm pretty sure I loved you every minute after."

  Her eyes pooled again and my thumb moved up to brush one stray tear away as it fell. "But you..."

  "Left you beaten and bloody in a hospital room like an asshole?"

  "Well... um... yeah..." she said, giving me a weird, wobbly smile. "You know, a little bird... actually... four little, very potty-mouthed birds, told me something..."

  I smiled at her description of the girls, my arms going tight around her back. "What'd they tell you?"

  "They said as much as their men loved them, they never loved them enough to let them go..."

  My heart seized at the hope in her voice, like it had been there all along, like she was trying to convince herself that it was a possibility. "Baby..."

  "So, um, they... convinced me to make you see that I... belong here. They said that even if you don't want me, that this, meaning Navasink Bank, is my new home and they're my new friends and..."

  "And?"

  "And I realized they were right," she said, open, forthcoming, no more guards, no thorns, no trying to keep me away. "This is where I belong. I've been looking my whole life for a place that felt like a home. This feels like home, Johnnie. Here, out there," she said, waving toward the front windows. "I spent three years in Alabama and the only person I connected with was Ben. I've been here a little over a week and I have fou
r women who have forced themselves into my life and I like it. I don't want to push them away. Lo said she's gonna show me how to spar and Summer let me babysit last night. Alex and Janie are building me a computer that will, in their words, 'kick ass'. And it's not just them either. Breaker and Cash and Wolf have been over to check on me, asking me if I need anything, taking turns teaching me about the good and bad areas around here. Paine came over a few nights and watched mindless chick flicks with me and didn't complain once... just so I wouldn't be alone. What you have here is good, Johnnie," she said, her eyes almost pleading, trying to make me see it. I already saw it. I knew I had a good group of people around me. But it felt good to know they pulled her into the fold; they took care of her in my absence. "And I want in," she finished. "So um... I just thought you should know that."

  "You done sweetheart?" I asked, and she scrunched up her nose at me.

  "Good, 'cause I got a few things to say too."

  I paused and, I guess it was for too long. "Are you going to say them or what?"

  "You ain't gonna like them, but they need to be said..."

  "Is this the part where you tell me you're flattered, but you'd rather go back to your manwhoring ways? Because, really, I just... just tell me now because I don't think my pride can take any more sucker punches, Johnnie."

  "This is the part where I tell you to shut it," I said with a smile as my hand shifted from her jaw to cover her mouth, "and listen. You need to understand why I walked away. I know you think you understand what you're getting into, darlin', and in theory it might even sound fun or exciting, but the reality isn't like that. I kill people. I know you know this. I know you've seen it. But that's what I do. It's a part of who I am. It's a small part, angel, and it's a part I don't live in day-to-day, but it's a part and it ain't going anywhere. I'm good at it. It pays well. And, well, some guys deserve to get dead. I've never had it blow back on anyone in my life and I would try like fuck to make sure none of it would touch you, but there are no guarantees honey..."